Question

“In places like Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Gurugram, where many IT firms or call centres are located, shops and restaurants have also changed their opening hours, and are open late.” Give reasons.

Answer 1

• overwork is built into the structure of outsourced projects in the IT sector: project costs and timelines are usually underestimated in terms of mandays, and because mandays are based on an eight-hour day, engineers have to put in extra hours and days in order to meet the deadlines.
• Extended working hours are legitimised by the common management practice of ‘flexitime’, which in theory gives an employee freedom to choose his or her working hours (within limits) but, which in practice, means that they have to work as long as necessary to finish the task at hand.
• But even when there is no real work pressure, they tend to stay late in the office either due to peer pressure or because they want to show the boss that they are working hard.